If you are anything like me, you love to purchase new kits when they are released, but just as fun is to randomly look through a designer’s store, finding a gem you might have missed on the release date. Well, let’s face it, whether new or old, shopping is just plain old fun, isn’t it? What’s not fun, sometimes, is trying to find the right kit, finding one that will work for a particular theme, event, topic, etc.
I’m partial to Christmas, winter and fall kits. I take a lot of outdoor photos, as well as lots of Christmas photos, so I always get a lot of use out of these kits. Once the summer ended, I would scour the store, looking for any new kits in these categories. Eventually I realized that I was under-utilizing a kit by pigeon-holing it into a specific theme. There were a lot of kits out there that could be used for the intended theme but could also be used for so many other themes too. The trick, I find, is to look at the elements, not the color, but the shapes, or how some elements can be combined to create a new use for them. Recoloring an element can sometimes completely change the way it is perceived.
Let me show you three layouts I’ve created using Curves by Dawn Inskip.
The first look at this kit inspires a page about my weight struggles, my rollercoaster health ride I’ve been on. This is a spectacular kit for this kind of page. Here’s the page I created about my weight loss journey. I didn’t need to do much to change any of the paper or elements, as the kit supplied great products for a health/weight kind of page.
My second page was completely different than my first page. I saw the metal wordart “SPECIAL” and knew I wanted to use that to describe my sweet boy, Taz; also, the stars and overlays would work well for my boy page too. For this page, I changed the color of some elements with a hue/sat adjustment layer and replace color adjustment layer. As it was a boy page, I wanted more a more masculine tone so stamped patterned paper onto the background layer, duplicated the layers a few times and changed the blend modes, which created the brown tones to match Taz’s coloring. So, see what I mean? At first glance, you might not have thought the kit would work so well for a masculine theme. But it turned out to be so easy to work with and with a little bit of tweaking, in a short amount of time, I had a wonderful boy page.
Now, my third page might really suprise you. Would you have thought this kit would be so good for a water themed page? What inspired a water theme for thispage was the circular doodles that instantly reminded me of water drops as did some of the overlays. I recolored and changed blending modes on the overlays and doodles to coordinate with my swan photos. I love the textures and colors mixed in amongst the “water droplets”.
So, do you see what I mean now? A kit can be so much more than you might originally think. Take a look at the bits and pieces, not the entirety of the kit and think about how parts of it may be used in unexpected ways and further extend the use of the kit for you. I hope I have inspired you to look twice, or three times, at a kit before deciding it may not work for whatever page theme you have in mind.
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